Winter’s Season: A Regency Mystery
This refreshingly different Regency mystery centers on Captain Edmund Winter, a decorated veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, who now serves the home office as a “special emissary.” The son of a farmer who was raised alongside an earl’s heir, Winter moves easily between the glittering world of Regency society and the squalor of the London everyone would prefer to forget about.
Winter has just succeeded in capturing a maniac who has been terrorizing the streetwalkers no one else cares about, when he stumbles across the body of a gently-bred young lady in a back alley, where she never should have been found. Society immediately closes ranks, making it difficult for Winter to even identify the body as Miss Cornelia Silverton, the sister of Sir Augustus Silverton, a self-made man who has married into the nobility. When the autopsy reveals the even more distressing news that Cornelia was pregnant, Winter finds himself investigating a case even his superiors are reluctant to see solved.
Winter’s greatest asset is also the book’s greatest asset: a canny understanding of what is necessary to operate in every stratum of Regency society. But that this ability comes with considerable cost is made clear by Winter’s uncertain relationship with Barbara Lightwood, a demimondaine who is engaged in a constant struggle to maintain the place in society she has won by her beauty and wits alone. Another great strength is the novel’s documentation of the lives of those who cannot afford so much a single misstep that may plunge them into disgrace and penury. A satisfying and engaging start to what should become a long-running series.
